Groundcover

Groundcover comes in many varieties. The most common being grass but there are many other plants that can be used depending on many factors.
For starters, do you want the area to look like the rest of the area? If it’s in the front yard you might take into consideration your neighbors. If they have grass you might want to stick to a type of grass although you might get a different kind. If they have accents of jasmine around trees or other landscaped areas you might consider jasmine or other low-lying cover.
If on the other hand if you don’t live very near anyone else you probably have a large area to cover. Native grasses can form a pasture area where you might have some livestock grazing or you may prefer a large lawn with garden areas in the middle of it.
This gets into another area to consider, how much maintenance you want to do? A pasture takes less maintenance than a lawn. The more complicated the area the more needs to be done to keep it looking good.
Shade comes into play since plants need different amounts of light. Large trees might dictate that some groundcovers won’t work since they would kill some grasses and other plants. If the area is heavily wooded you might consider various vines that can grow up the trees while at the same time covering the ground between them.
The amount of water the area gets without your help might also be considered. If you live in an arid climate you would choose a much different plant than if you had a more humid climate. The same would go for temperatures.
If you want to amend the soil or water it then your options increase greatly but with the larger areas it might not be a practical idea.
Whatever you choose to use be sure you want to keep it for a while. It might not be very expensive but the work behind putting it in and removing it if you change your mind later can take a long time especially if you don’t have a lot of help or power tools to do the work.

Puzzles

The first time I was introduced to a puzzle box it took only a few minutes to figure it out. I was nine years old at the time.
It was apparently impressive to those around me and so to get me out of their hair I was given the egg puzzle. It's a clear puzzle with flatish pieces that interlock to make an egg with a key pin to hold it all together. They figured it would take me several hours to complete and as stubborn as I still am I would have sat there that long if that's what it would take. It didn't. It took all of just under an hour. This too impressed them since it took quite a bit longer for an adult to do the same puzzle the first time he had tried it. Of course it gets easier if you do it more and remember what shape comes next but that led to even more puzzles. One of the harder ones was a set of puzzles that you had to put together to form cubes. Each cube was a different color and was made to fit with its own pieces. They got harder as they went down the row. The last one I wasn't able to figure out and decided that it would be easier to wait until someone else figured it out for me and work backwards. Everyone said it was cheating and I asked to see the rule book. There wasn't one and so I had no problem with it.
The first puzzle I ever had that wasn't a jigsaw puzzle was a very old ball puzzle made of only five pieces. My grandmother gave it to me and said that she had gotten it out of a cracker jacks box when she was little. I don't know where it went and to this day can't seem to find another one. It's not on any cracker jack prize list I can find and no search results come up with anything remotely close. One day I hope to find another one tucked away somewhere and if I do then I'll make several copies out of wood or whatever I can find. It was a brilliant idea. The last piece slid through the middle of the rest of the pieces, a key, and had a loop on the front end to hang it from. Gravity kept it together.
Since then I have played with many other puzzles, jigsaws being one of my favorite still. I don't think I would make a very good puzzle maker though. In general it seems that puzzles are merely copies of past puzzles with a little twist somewhere to be a little different. Some of them aren't even puzzles but are good enough. They still challenge the mind and make you think. Among these are the sliding banks and sculptures that are more decorative and interesting to look at since they often have moving pieces.
Similar to puzzles are mazes which I don't have the room to even start to dream about. I only know of a few types of in person mazes, shrub maze, labyrinth, hay bale maze and maze of mirrors. I don't have room for any of them. I have drawn mazes just to see how complex they can get. I think they have been lost to the past but I once drew a pixel by pixel maze 600x800. It took me a couple minutes to draw the solution and would take months if not years to get through it in person if you didn't know the way.
Riddles are a written or verbal puzzle. Some of them have to be written to really make sense and challenge the person trying to come up with the solution.
This brings me to ask, although I could probably google it, why are old familiar things called chestnuts?

Cats

I have two of them and yes that is in the right order. I can't help it if some people spoil their cats to the point that they become slaves. People do the same thing with their children and yet no one seems to understand that, just like children, cat's want discipline. They don't want to admit it and for that matter they don't want to admit anything. If a cat falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, did it really happen? The cat would deny even being in the woods when this supposed falling occurred.
There have been many times when one of my cats fell from some perch of theirs and fell flat on their side and denied ever having been in the room much less on the perch. They do this by quickly leaving the room and minutes later sauntering in like they had been taking a long nap. They even stretch real long the moment the come into sight so you understand that the nap really went well.
That brings me to another of the many misconceptions of cats. They don't always land on thier feet. This can be due to many reasons. The most common reason being they were asleep and didn't realize they were falling in the first place. This is followed closely by the, I didn't realize I hadn't jumped high enough or possibly in the right direction, reason. While hunting a cat doesn't always know exactly where they are in relation to anything else and the edge of a bed can shift on them and wham they hit the floor instead.
One positive thing can be said for most cats, they bounce well. Unless your cat is suffering from old age or bone loss, your cat can bounce back from a great many things. Cars is not one of them which is why it is often a good idea to keep cats inside, well that and a host of other things like dogs, other cats, diseases, and possibly other predatory animals that might think your cat is a tasty meal.
A cat usually lives to be around 15 years old if kept in good health. This goes down to about 12 years in my experience with outside cats. One friend of ours had a cat live to be over 20 years old. She got it when she was born and it died a few years after she got married. It was active until the end so they don't think it was suffering, it was just old.
Really cats are wonderful pets as long as you take care that it stay the pet and not the owner.

Favorites

Everyone has a favorite. You might not have a favorite everything but I think that’s going a little overboard anyway.
You can blame my wife for this post since she is the one who inadvertently mentioned it. She merely stated that everyone’s favorite mug should have a tea stain in it. Hers definitely does and it will probably only get darker as the days trudge on.
It all begins when we’re little. A favorite color or toy quickly gets replaced with a new favorite and the cycle only seems to slow down as we get older. There may be a favorite ball player until he starts to loose, commit crimes, or end up in rehab. A favorite movie can last a long time but usually gets replaces several times throughout life. Tastes change and the great movie that you loved in the eighties is now a so-so movie in 2009 since the special effects are not all that good anymore and the plot doesn’t make as much sense as when you were eight.
Favorite friends change much more quickly. As we pass through different phases of life, childhood, school, working, marriage, moving away, these all change the favorite things by giving us a different perspective to look at them and it’s really hard to keep the friends with you if you move a long distance. We’re so busy in life that things that aren’t readily there can be forgotten.
This is exactly why the tea stain is important. It is proof that it is actually a favorite since it is used so much that the stain won’t go away. I can vouch for it’s permanence since I have personally tried washing it umpteen times to no avail.
None of us want to be considered wishy washy though. You might be thinking, “I would never forget my best friend!” and you might not. Can you remember who your best friend was in elementary school or your lab partner who you may have hung out with constantly for a semester in college? Maybe, but most of us go on with life and new people flow in and out all the time.
Sometimes it’s not a case of forgetting or moving on but our own bodies might just make the decision for us. For example a food allergy might make one of your favorite foods not so favorite as it starts to close up your windpipe making it a little difficult to breathe. Our taste buds change every so often and you might think that liverwurst and onion sandwich is to die for. I haven’t had any thing that drastic happen but it could. Your body also gets used to things or in some cases no longer is able to stand some of the things you once enjoyed. Tabasco might not be in your fridge for a reason.
Even the blogs you follow change from time to time depending on what’s happening in your life. Just because it’s a favorite now doesn’t mean you have to follow it until the writer dies.

Deeds

A deed is a piece of paper which describes a piece of property and who owns it. The entire country is divided this way and the records are kept locally at the courthouse in your area. This might lead a person to conclude that everything is accounted for but there are constantly problems with what the records say and what you might find when you get to wherever you are going. Some places still have squatters rights, which simply means if you settle in a place for long enough and no one tells you that you can’t then you have the legal right to go down to the courthouse and claim the property as yours. Now if you happen to be the person who owned it previously and weren’t aware that someone was squatting there then you might be a little surprised and upset to find out that you don’t own it anymore even if you’ve been paying taxes on the land.
There are also fence rights. Simply put, if you have fenced in an area and have maintained it as yours for some length of time and no dispute has come up there is a good chance that you may legally own it even if it originally belonged to your neighbor. Of course a lot depends on your lawyer and the particulars of where you live and who’s fighting against you. If it’s a mega corporation then you might as well give up.
There are still cases of property that no one seems to have claimed yet or that has slipped through the cracks. I’ve seen some pieces of land two feet wide and several hundred feet long go unnoticed for decades until someone decided to develop an area and realizes that there is a strip of land they can’t seem to find an owner for to get their permission to cross over.
There are also public right of ways all over the place that just run through properties unnoticed by the general public since there is no pavement or obvious access to it. There was an abandoned road that ran for over a mile back behind some houses that the city didn’t even remember. When they were asked about it they were surprised to see it there since it was thought to have been released a long time ago. The pavement was almost entirely crumbled back to little rocks when it was finally released.
In Louisiana I know that it can be hard to get land in some places since one piece of land can be owned by several people to various degrees and to purchase it outright you need to contact each person and get each one to agree to the sale. Much of the mass ownership comes from inheritance issues. At least in the past, I’m not sure if it still works this way, when someone died without a will the land was jointly owned by all of the heirs. They would then have to decide what to do and often did nothing more than jointly use it.

Tea

Tea is one of the oldest and most common drinks on the planet. There are even entire businesses dedicated to the stuff. What would an antique shop be without the tea room on the side to attract the lunch crowd? Tea is also one of the most commonly misunderstood drinks on the planet.
What exactly is tea? Well in a nut shell it is what you get when you steep a specific leaf in very hot water. The exact temperature of the water depends on the person’s taste in tea but it’s usually hot. The thing that people call herbal tea is not a tea but merely an infusion or decoction of whatever plant is being used.
There are different kinds of tea depending on how the leaves were prepared and what part of the leaf is used. White tea is made from only the tips of the leaves, usually the first sprouts of the season. The degree to which some teas have been prepared can range from green tea to black tea. Additives to the tea leaves result in various types of teas like earl gray and irish breakfast tea. Breakfast teas are so named because of the amount of caffeine in them which is to wake you up.
Many claims have been made about the health benefits of tea from curing cancer to helping digestion to getting rid of the little puffy bags under the eyes. One thing that most people seem to agree on is that it tastes good and there are of course some who will even disagree to that.
Tea is grown in a wide range of places from the orient, where it is believed that it originated, to people’s back yards. It’s such a large industry that there are still more companies trying to find more places to grow the stuff to either keep up with the demand or get a slice of the pie. I’ve even toyed with planting a tea plant myself.
The tea plant is not where tea tree oil comes from however. The tea tree is another of the many non tea plants that you can use to make an infusion out of and still is used in Australia where it grows.
Of all of the teas that I know people around here drink the two favorites are earl gray and green tea. I blame Star Trek on the popularity of earl gray since there are a lot of Star Trek fans in the area, although that might just be the people I know. Of the non-tea teas the favorites seem to be chamomile, red rooibos and mint.
If you don’t know what kind of tea you like then there are many companies that you can look up to get sample packs or tea rooms that will give you a taste of some of the teas they have for sale. You might even want to throw a tea party and have each guest bring a different kind of tea. When I say tea here I mean all of the infusible mixtures available in bag and loose forms.

Sweaters

In the cold months ahead many people will don the often-used sweater. It’s interesting to see the vast variety of sweaters out there from the plain sweater just made to keep you warm to the very revealing sweaters some youths wear that I don’t think will keep anyone warm since it really doesn’t cover much past the arms. I have owned many sweaters and during my youth did not like wearing them. As I’ve gotten older I find there is a good reason I didn’t like them. It wasn’t the look since they really don’t look any different from most of the clothing out there aside from some of the patters they can come in. Well if you go that route there are some very definite reasons not to wear some sweaters, they’re extremely ugly. But past that the look isn’t bad. Even after buying more sweaters and not wearing them from some terrible childhood memory it never clicked what the actual problem was. They just felt bad. Itchy, scratchy, burlapian, whatever you want to call it, I like to call it torture, they were just not what you should put against your skin. It took a while for this to come up into my mind but it was the material that made sweaters unbearable to me.
Recently I took up crocheting again and have made a blanket out of some cheap yarn and yes cheap is the word. It didn’t cost much for good reason but it is warm. It took 4 skeins of yarn to complete it. It isn’t fancy, a simple single stitch throughout and all the same purple color. It’s utilitarian at best. My wife then took me along and we were looking at wool yarn. We bought 3 skeins of it and took them home. Honestly it’s more comforting to hold one of those skeins than to use the blanket made of the cheap yarn. While holding one of these skeins one evening my wife asked me why I hadn’t worn the sweaters I had bought. It came to my mind that they must have been made of cheap yarn. The truth is that I probably never even looked twice at them remembering the sweaters of years past and cringing. She brought me out one of the sweaters and handed it to me. It was not like I had remembered it at all. Then I looked at the tag and found that this sweater was made of 100% wool. There was the key to a wonderful sweater. I had been used to only being able to afford cheap sweaters and here was a soft warm and very comfortable sweater which I am currently wearing as I write this. Next time you want to buy your children something warm for the winter please don’t buy them a torturous garment made with cheap yarn that will scar their memories for years to come. Not only will they not want to wear a sweater, if it gets wet they won’t stay warm anyhow.